Malcolm Henry

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Scottish Independence: Do They Really Want To Know?

The Yes Scotland campaign website has a page, “Undecided – tell us why?”, where you can fill in a form with your reasons for not knowing which way you might vote at next year’s independence referendum.

A week or so ago I sent them this message:

Our financial system is designed in such a way that increasing prosperity can only occur alongside an increase in private debt, which means the prosperity is ultimately unsustainable.

The burden of private debt repayment (principal and interest) will continue to increase exponentially until it overwhelms the rest of the economy.

When we get to this point our economy will seize up and there will be widespread chaos and panic as people are unable to get the things that they need.

This will happen sooner or later, with or without independence, unless we change the way our banking system works, in particular the way in which we create and distribute new money.

This issue is far more important and pressing than that of independence but neither the Yes or the No campaign appears to recognise it, let alone has any idea how to solve the problem.

I fear that independence will result in a protracted and expensive untangling of bureaucratic ties with the rest of the UK, which will distract all of us (Scotland and rUK) from tackling this problem while we still have an opportunity to avoid the chaos.

Less pressing but probably more baffling (because it’s so obvious) is the lack of recognition that our political system is frustratingly dysfunctional.

Neither Yes or No campaigns appear to understand that many (most?) of us in the middle of the debate are utterly disillusioned with centralised party politics and long for someone to come up with a plausible vision of a political system in which people are encouraged to collaborate to deliver solutions that work, first locally and then regionally/nationally.

We don’t much care where the national boundary is. What’s important is how well the administration reflects our needs and priorities and translates these into useful actions.

My friends who are Yes supporters tell me to vote in the hope that we can change things after Scotland becomes independent, but I’m not convinced that we can afford the distraction of independence.

If you can address these two systemic problems – financial and democratic – and convince me that independence offers the best way to implement reforms that will solve them, then I’ll be happy to vote “yes”.

As yet I’ve had no response and seen nothing on the Answers page that acknowledges the problems of democratic and financial dysfunction.

That’s a shame because these are the major issues of our time which are being more or less ignored by UK politics and therefore represent an opportunity for the Yes campaign to attract the attention of lots of us who are sitting in the middle, wondering why we should bother with the hassle of independence.